| Glenn Seaborg |
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John Baldessari
acrylic on canvas
72" x 72"
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john baldessari is not only a
“leader in his field” he is also in “my” line of work and has achieved success i can only dream of a visit to the space where two or three decades of art making were subtly layered was truly inspiring there’s a photo collage of his face with cindy sherman’s here a cocktail napkin from jodi foster there and strewn everywhere is every catalog from every new exhibition everywhere at first i thought he really keeps up with these things later i noticed many of them were still in plastic still later i noticed they all had 3x5 cards on them “dear john sorry you couldn’t make it to the opening we must catch up soon” —your pal the curator because of his brilliant and long career in conceptual photography his unparalleled run at cal arts almost single-handedly nurturing an entire generation of art stars |
there are many things you could say many stories i should probably tell about john baldessari but as a young artist fond of dots and of pondering the battleground where geometric abstraction and representational figuration meet my favorite john baldessari story is the one about how he started painting dots over faces and other parts of photographic images he’d been teaching drawing for a while and his students seemed to spend so much of their time, energy and talent on faces and not enough on the rest of the model finally in frustration he put a paper bag over the model’s head and forced them to draw to look at everything else a while later he started painting dots on photographs on the most focal bits of the image forcing the viewer to forgo the obvious, the familiar forcing the viewer to look to look at everything else forcing the viewer to see |
| Conceptual Photographer |
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26 October 99
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